French Speaking Worlds: Lauren Clay - A Crisis of Representation: Chambers of Commerce, Empire, and the Politics of Grievance on the Eve of the French Revolution

Please join French Speaking Worlds: Then and Now for A Crisis of Representation: Chambers of Commerce, Empire, and the Politics of Grievance on the Eve of the French Revolution, a talk with Lauren R. Clay (Vanderbilt University).

Abstract: In the 1780s, France's chambers of commerce, institutions that provided a measure of political voice and status for elite commercial capitalists, felt increasingly besieged. Royal decrees and treaties refashioned trade relations with the Caribbean colonies (1784), South and East Asia (1785), and England (1786) in ways that appeared to threaten their economic interests. Almost as troubling, in each case they were taken by surprise: the Chambers and in some cases even their deputies to the royal Bureau of Commerce were deliberately shut out of negotiations.

France's most prominent business elites have often been dismissed as apolitical, backwards-looking, greedy, and motivated by "an unwillingness to compete." I propose that their sustained opposition to physiocratic principles and ministerial policy merits closer attention, in part because négociants experienced these years as a crisis of representation. Focusing largely on the archives of the Chamber of Commerce of Bordeaux, I analyze ways in which they deployed a politics of grievance to forge stronger relationships with merchant organizations across France. Anger and frustration prompted them to reassess their lobbying practices, with some lucrative results, but also to reflect on representational politics in France and the colonies. Reframing merchants as political economic thinkers and actors of consequence, this research suggests that the networks and tools they honed at this time prepared them to make even bolder claims, working largely behind the scenes to influence economic and political outcomes during the early French Revolution.

Lauren R. Clay is Associate Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. Her published work focuses on cultural and commercial institutions and the politics of colonial trade and slavery in Old Regime and Revolutionary France. She is the author of Stagestruck: The Business of Theater in Eighteenth-Century France and Its Colonies (Cornell University Press, 2013) and co-editor with Jennifer Sessions of France and the World: Mapping Concepts and Approaches (Manchester University Press, forthcoming February 2027). Her article "Liberty, Equality, Slavery: Debating the Slave Trade in Revolutionary France” in the American Historical Review was awarded the 2024 Koren Prize by the Society for French Historical Studies. She is currently at work on a book project entitled Influence: Voice, Status, and the Politics of Commerce in Old Regime and Revolutionary France.

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